A petition to improve Xbox's globalisation efforts has now received over 1500 signatures, with the primary complaint being that "out of 193 countries on the planet, only 42 are currently supported by Xbox, and most in a poor way."
Campaign leader and Xbox Ambassador Catarina Ferreira highlighted the petition's latest update recently on Twitter, where she shared some extremely in-depth results of a recent survey, including that "a large number of people consider Xbox is NOT well represented in their country", with just the US receiving a proper 100% positive rating.
Catarina Ferreira has advised supporters of the petition that the results have reportedly "helped boost internal conversations" at Xbox, but there has been "no official answer from anyone at Microsoft about this problem."
Here are some of the areas the petition has targeted in its open letter to Xbox boss Phil Spencer:
"These are only a few requests we would like to discuss/have some feedback on:
- Increase the number of Xbox Live supported countries
- Improve regional teams and marketing in already supported countries
- Reach those billions of gamers by seeing the potential of smaller markets
- Broader globalization of features like Microsoft Rewards and promotions like Xbox All Access
- Provide solution for payment methods currently restricted, originating from unsupported countries
- Improve support for different languages on 1st party Xbox games
- Help developers improve localization
- Support the local communities
- Commitment to discuss these issues and possible solutions with Xbox fans"
Without a doubt, it'd be great to see the team at Xbox doing even more to improve globalisation in the future, and hopefully this petition will help with that. Be sure to check out Catarina Ferreira's lengthy Twitter thread on this topic if you want to know more, and you can also access the full survey results over on the petition's website.
What are your thoughts on Xbox's globalisation efforts? Let us know down in the comments below.
Comments 10
This would be cool, but just to be that guy: trying to globalize is a very expensive task with high risk of low or negative returns
I think Xbox is okay in Brazil. The system and most games are localized to Brazilian Portuguese, local currency is supported in the store, we have access to rewards, Game Pass and cloud gaming. I can't understand why a whopping 86% of my countrymen were dissatisfied. Maybe it has something to do with hardware prices being too high (Series X is about 1000 dollars here), but there's not much that Microsoft can do about that...and we actually pay slightly cheaper for software. My only complaint is that some special services, like the customizable controllers are usually unavailable outside USA and Europe.
However, my brother currently lives in Peru, and Xbox support is not great there. He uses a Brazilian account in order to access Xbox Game Pass and cloud gaming.
I would love for rewards to be included in Portugal. Not sure how does it works with technical suporte as so far I have no issues with systems
The list is a bit too ambitious for the reason explained by @XBontendo but it should be pretty easy to release all games everywhere, even if they're not translated to the regional languages and accept credit cards and currencies around the world (if they don't). Rewards should also be easy to expand but not so sure about the online services considering some of those countries don't have proper infrastructures. Some countries overcharge for hardware but that's not Microsoft's fault. When I checked xbox.com and saw so many countries (stores) at the bottom, I was surprised.
@BlueOcean Thanks. This is way more complicated than I had time to explain.
@XBontendo Yep, the whole list would be too ambitious considering the circumstances.
@Carck Yes you read well my opinion. Do you think that these points are not ambitious?
I'm from Peru, and it's extremely frustrating because every other neighboring country has access to things like gamepass. It simply does not exist in my region. I have a series S and a US account for that (with a corresponding payment method), and every single person that has seen/played my console or has heard of the cost of gamepass and the budget price of the series S itself has been blown away, 2 of my friends have already bought one because of this.
Paying a small monthly fee for access to a trove of games on a cheap console is the ideal package for this market, and I simply cannot even purchase it even if I want to.
Don't let me stream, fine, maybe there are concerns about infraestructure and whatever, but let me at least download the games from my region. I have been using the convoluted region swapping method and I have had no problems whatsoever.
Until Microsoft takes localisation seriously as Sony does, they will always play second fiddle to both Sony and Nintendo. Its just how it is.
Eh those survey results and methodology aren't really fair comparisons, sample size isn't evenly distributed & the percentages don't really tell you anything if you don't have a fair sample size per country. Like investing based on this market research would get you nowhere realistically
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